1. Amazon gives its revenue from anti-Islam group’s song to refugees

The Washington Post is engaging in precisely the intolerable behavior it’s accusing Republicans of – assigning collective guilt, in the face of ample evidence to the contrary.

Here’s what the Post said in a recent editorial:

“The Republican Party, once small government’s champion, is now the party that breeds presidential contenders who would monitor schools and mosques, shut down parts of the Internet and exclude certain immigrants for no reason beyond the faith they profess,” the newspaper’s editorial board writes. “In the GOP debate Tuesday, those ideas – along with can-you-top-this rhetorical barrages aimed at illegal immigrants and Syrian refugees – received a generally polite reception, with constitutional, legal and practical questions contemptuously dismissed as ‘political correctness.'”

Now, if that was all true, it would be a bad thing. Collective guilt, or guilt by association, is a fallacy. The Post, repeatedly and vociferously, rebukes those who would lump all Muslims in with radicals.

Yet that’s what it’s doing. Even though it acknowledges that no, not every Republican candidate agrees with those views.

“True, the extremism that now passes for mainstream Republican thought, robbed of its shock value by the unfiltered ravings of Donald Trump, was punctured from time to time with expressions of dismay, incredulity and doubt,” the Post admitted. “Former Florida governor Jeb Bush and Sen. Rand Paul (Ky.) skewered Mr. Trump’s plans for the United States to ban all Muslim immigrants or murder the families of terrorists, and Mr. Paul, along with Ohio Gov. John Kasich, rightly dismissed Mr. Trump’s blithe suggestion that he could somehow censor the Internet in parts of the world where jihadist sentiment runs deep.”

So to sum up, the Post claims that the Republican Party believes X, even though X was repudiated on stage at Tuesday’s debate.

In fact, the worst of those examples of “Republican bigotry” were all espoused by Donald Trump. In no way is Trump representative of the Republican Party.

Writing for RealClearPolitics.com, Carl Cannon explains, the “guy has never really been on the GOP team… Americans can change their political orientation over time – Ronald Reagan did it – but you’d be hard-pressed to find a Republican who during the last 28 years has variously listed his voter registration as Republican, Independence Party, Democrat, Republican again, and (as recently as 2012) registered himself in New York as ‘decline to state.’ In the midst of that orgy of fickleness, Trump ran briefly for president – as a Reform Party candidate.”

If you follow the money, Trump has given far more to Democrats than to Republicans.

The Post might respond that Trump’s poll numbers show he expresses what the GOP base is thinking. That’s flawed, because the polls are flawed. At this point in the election cycle, polls gauge little more than name recognition.

But assuming the worst, that Trump supporters actually agree with all his views, he’s still pulling only a percentage of the party – less than half, even in his best polls.

That’s no cause for the Washington Post to claim all Republicans are bigots.